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Bellum omnium contra omnes

Tag Archives: racism

AKA the history of humanity. Well, OK, I’m not going to tackle THAT monster here, I just like the title, really.

Well, there IS some substance on the subject of stupid today. There was actually a whole lot of idiot on the streets of Washington today. Protesters who were protesting the health care bill, the tea party patriots, apparently think it is patriotic not only to back the health care conglomerate billionaires and protect their ability to drop anyone they please when they please, the ACTUAL death panels which are run by corporate America’s health insurance companies, but it is according, to these tea party zipper heads, patriotic to hurl angry racist and homophobic invective at members of congress.

James Clyburn of South Carolina, John Lewis of Georgia, and 2 other congressmen were apparently called “N*gg*r” and a few other things on their way to congress today, Emanuel Cleaver was spit upon as well, and apparently they called Barney Frank a fag or some such bullshit.

Listen, America. I love you. You are a great nation, but this kinda crap is unnecessary and stupid and immoral. You gay bashing, African American hating ass hats are the last vestiges of a happily dead past that no one wants back. Keep your hate, your fascism, and your inability to understand that all this is being caused by the wool being pulled over your eyes by those on the right who want to protect their business interests at the expense of the health of the citizenry to yourselves. You members of the tea party who were in Washington for the Code Red protest who later did this need to get a grip.

Your opinion of James Clyburn’s or anyone else’s skin color and Barney Franks sexual preferences have no bearing at all on the health care debate. In the end Health care will pass, and James Clyburn will still be black, and still be better than you, and Barney Frank will still be gay, and he will still be better than you. Better how? They will vote FOR helping Americans that need help, and want the better future that this fiscally and ethically responsible bill will provide for ALL Americans. And you will still be a stupid ugly little hate machine, doing the bidding of those who care nothing for you or the nation in which you live, and getting nothing in return for it, but a moment that you can look back on for the rest of your life…and lie to yourself and say you did something good.

When you didn’t.

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The people chanting “Homo” and yelling “n*gg*” are the face of the new Conservative party, AKA the Tea Party Patriots. These people think that they are helping America. They think America’s health care is being taken over by government when it isn’t. They think this is going to somehow affect the number of nurses and doctors negatively, when it won’t. They think it’ll mean everyone will be forced to pay for Abortions whether they want to or not, when they won’t.

And yes, they do think. But those thoughts are guided by wants and needs of their own, perhaps as much as by those who manipulate them, rather than the needs of the nation. And what are those needs? They hate that democrats won in 2006 and 2008, and may keep that control in 2010, and it frightens them. They hate that people who don’t think like they do run things. They hate that people who don’t agree with what they think are in control. Normally there isn’t anything wrong with that, but when they let it become this, like these tea party bigots did today, health care becomes a side issue and it shows the real reason you are out there, to vent your spleen. It stops being about politics and becomes more about the demons in their own souls.

But that is in their soul, their hearts and the evil had to show itself at some point. It sucks that it has to be there at all, but racist stupidity like this can’t be helped in American society, I guess.

It exposes to the whole world the real dark heart of the Tea Party and the conservative movement, Hate. Capital H Hate.

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That’s it from here. Later!

Today’s Nuggets, via wikiquote: If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness—if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason—you know that it was a trick, and it’s worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then. Tim Wise

The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart. Barack Obama

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You see some stupid things sometimes. I’m searching a few sites, just looking at the news, and I came across this story about a fight on a bus in Oakland. It is kinda funny, but it’s also sad and just a hair stupid. I didn’t initially read the story, because there was a video attached to it, shot on the bus during the incident. The viddy showed an old man telling some kid to shine his shoes, and the kid gets pissed off. There is some jawing back and forth, and the old man gets up and walks away, yelling as he goes. The kid yells back and it starts back and forth that way, old man in the front of the bus, kid in back. Kid gets up and runs to the front of the bus after one exchange, and smacks the old man. This is where things got hairy.

The old man got up and whooped his ass. Pounded him but good. Broke his nose, left him a bloody mess on the floor of the bus. There was at least a racial tinge to this story, though. The old man, who told the kid to shine his shoes, was white and the kid was black. Blatantly racist. There were no good guys here. A belligerent kid tried to get tough and pushed a cantankerous racist old man and the cantankerous old man pushed back, hard. The old man got off the bus, and eventually the police came and both men were brought to the hospital. The CBS report said nothing of arrests.

There’s enough bullshit in the world. Even if the kid was justified in his anger towards the the old man and his racist statement, and to be honest I think he was justified in that way, It was a war of words, and there the kid won. The old man walked away, and he should have left it at that. But he wanted to make an example of the old man by smacking him, and there he lost, and badly at that.

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Ah, the joy of 21st century living. Surf the web. Watch 1,000 networks with content that truly spans the globe. Get instant updates about the the world in all its splendor and glory. Enjoy a myriad of technological wonders. And watch crazy people.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with people. They are human. They are weak. They are frail. They have wants and needs that can’t be fulfilled and they get angry and disillusioned about how the world works and decide that rather than be responsible and change themselves they lash out. And we get to watch it all unfold in front of our eyes.

They are flawed, damaged people in a flawed damaged world, wondering why the world is flawed and damaged. Rather than try to fix problems, they fall back on their more animalistic tendencies and hit when things don’t work. But that is a human reaction.

We are getting better as a species, so Mr. Pinker in the following viddy says, but there is still room for improvement.

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That’s it from me. Later!

Today’s nuggets, Via wikiquote: The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the full loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States. C. Wright Mills

The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime. H.L. Mencken

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I’m looking for work, and there are job openings out there, but no one calls back. It happens, and I will find something, that isn’t the issue, it seems that the more I look the less I see out there on the job front. My wife is now helping me do this, and in fact sent in some resumes to a few places that I probably normally wouldn’t have. Places in new jersey, jobs where the job description is close to but doesn’t really match my skills. Maybe I should have been looking there in the first place, but I tell you I am not enamored of the thought of going back to working on copy machines.

Which is why I’m so happy that on Monday I’m going to be going to be looking into training in other fields, so I can have a career and not just a McJob. Don’t get me wrong, any work that pays the bills is fine by me, but just the thought of going back to those benightedly useless tree killing pieces of shit that do no good for anyone anywhere, and make it possible for the people who work them to just barely make ends meet, makes me wretch.

A lot of good people waste their lives working in offices, and I’ll be damned if I stick around and do that for the rest of my life. My wife deserves better from me. The World deserves better from me. I deserve better from myself.

That said, I’ll go back to it if I have no choice. Temporarily though, not permanently. I’ll gladly break rocks in the sweltering heat and the frozen tundra for the rest of my life before contemplating working in a copy center as my main source of income. Better to die burnt and blistered on a God forsaken rock shoveling shit than go back to that.

I’ve been filling time until I can get myself work again. Running more, much more. Eating more, much more. Starting fights online, if you read my previous post you know what I’m talking about. The running is perhaps the easiest for me to do. Sure I beat the hell out of my feet and my legs, but so what? I also make myself stronger. I now run longer distances, much longer than I used to. Time was when the most i would do, absolute maximum would be 40 miles in a week, and this year I hadn’t hit 30 miles a week up until last month. Been racking up the mileage this month though. Been working in 2 and 3 day blocks, with one day off in between. Just finished a 2 day block where I ran 26 miles in those 2 days, and the previous 3 day block, I ran 32 miles. 58 miles in my last 5 run days. This time 2 months ago, I would be lucky to have run 25 miles in that time.

And I took today off and I’ll have Saturday off, so it’s looking like tomorrow may well be another very long run. Might go 3 hours, just to see if I can do it. That would be, if I have my times correct, 22 miles tomorrow. We’ll see.

But that’s OK. I have been taking cold baths afterwards to heal up faster and I tell you it works wonders on my legs. No worries. And I am actually gaining weight because I am hungry as hell after these long runs, and I eat like a damn pig.

The fights online are almost as addictive as the running and eating are. I actually registered with the newspaper the Kansas city star just to fight with people. I saw an article there on Jimmy Carter bringing up the race card, and there were these people saying he’s an idiot and he has no idea what he’s talking about and Obama got all these white votes therefore there is no racism. That kind of happiness.

A short aside.

I will not say every bit of anger at the current administration is race based. It clearly isn’t, but the undercurrent is there, and it isn’t inconsequential. Witch doctor photos, the birthers, Rush Limbaugh’s racist rants, these things are part of the discussion, and they are racist. Denial of racism doesn’t make racism go away, it just covers it up for those who want it covered up. And what happens when you fight on the side that has this as a weapon in it’s arsenal is you get pegged with the tag “racist” yourself, like it or not, true or not, because you stand with those who are racist.

Back to the fighting.

I don’t mind if you think he’s an idiot. It’s a free country, speak your piece. Now the other stuff I have an issue with, so I went out of my way to register with this newspaper just to mess with these people. I walked in and picked on quite a number of people. They called me moron, they hated me something fierce. I didn’t mind. Let’em yammer, ain’t no skin off my ass. They were yelling about Van Jones and Professor Gates. Peripheral issues at best, I thought, and told them so. They called me more names. LOL says I. Old issues say I. If you can’t see inherent racism in white people yelling about black people (Jones and Gates) who have nothing to do with the main issue (Jimmy Carter, the alleged idiot, talking about how there’s still hate in America), then you are blind.

They didn’t respond to that last bit. Gave’em something to chew on, and I don’t think they liked the taste of it, either.

If you are going to hate, Own it, be it, Live it. Don’t run in fear from the truth your own emotions confront you with.

Today’s nuggets, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Via wikiquote: It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that. At first putting forth great effort to be sure that you have grasped the basics, then practicing so that they may come to fruition is something that will never stop for your whole lifetime. Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, “This is not enough.”

By just one single word martial valor can be made apparent. In peaceful times words show one’s bravery. In troubled times, too, one knows that by a single word his strength or cowardice can be seen. This single word is the flower of one’s heart. It is not something said simply with one’s mouth. A warrior should not say something fainthearted even casually. He should set his mind to this beforehand. Even in trifling matters the depths of one’s heart can be seen.

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It looks like I’ll have something part time but good for at least the next few weeks. It’ll be either a supervising consultant gig or a lead operator job doing a very large rush scan job , looks to be around a quarter million pages at least. It’ll take some time, but they want a three to four week turnaround, and they don’t have the equipment in house yet. Hopefully I get the consultant gig, which pays more, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.

My wife.

Poor kid, she was beside herself when her Bruins lost in OT to the Upstart Hurricanes at home in game seven tonight. The Bruins looked good playing for much of the time they were out there, but a shot from the right side by veteran Scott Walker got over the glove of Tim Thomas. She said she knew they weren’t going to win, but dammit they looked pretty good out there for a lot of the time I watched. Ya, early in OT the Hurricanes dominated possession, but did nothing spectacular with the puck. No matter, the Hurricanes won anyway and I have to go console a brokenhearted Bruins fan.

What passes for Political debate.

I’ve been doing some commenting on some Youtube viddys of Janeane Garafalo calling the Tea party people racists. There were signs at the tea party I attended (not as a protester mind you, but as a curious onlooker) that were very much anti-Obama, anti-Democrat, and anti-government, and some that you could call racist, and I did see a number of them that were at several of the televised tea parties that were blatantly racist. Her argument here is strong, both in the way it was couched and her able defense of self. She’s a good kid.

Sleep.

I could use some sleep. Not going to bed soon though. Despite the fact that i got about 5 hours sleep and have been running around much of the day, I’m not really tired. Think I’m gonna wind down and hang with my wife.

Sounds Like a Plan.

That’s It for me. Later!

Today’s Nuggets, by Albert Einstein, via wikiquote: Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.

Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.

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Nothing about Solfege or Food Riots here. Talk of the U.N. conference on racism here.

I read the news some days, and some days it makes sense, and some days it just throws me off. I have been reading for example a variety of stories about a conference on racism that is going to take place on Monday in Geneva. I wrote about 700 words on said story, when I suddenly realized that the entire tack of the story I had written was in fact completely off base.

Oof and other such statements. What I had written consisted basically of ripping the United Nations a new one for putting together a

Black and White

conference on Racism that was run ostensibly by anti-Semites. THAT isn’t true,there are problems with the conference but that isn’t it, and the organization that I had directed a large portion of my ire towards, was responsible not for being anti-Semites, but FIGHTING anti-semitism.

I’m still scratching my head a little on this one, and that won’t due. What I do know is that The United States won’t go because there is language in the charter of the conference that is still too one sided and there is also language there that seems to point towards restrictions on freedom of speech. The one sidedness I speak of is in fact anti-Israel, and there was a similar conference 8 years ago that both the United States and Israel walked out on due to an extreme anti-Israel slant. In fact in that first conference the only nation mentioned by name was Israel.

With all the evil perpetrated in the world using race as a backdrop, the ONLY nation to get publicly hung was Israel. That is wrong, and pointed out the extremity of the anti-semitism of the first conference. It is to not be party of a repeat of that, that a number of nations, from Italy, to Canada, The United States, Israel and several other nations have dropped out of the conference.

I am hoping that something positive comes of the conference, the world needs to address the problem that is racism. It would be nice if nations dealt with the people in a fair and equitable manner so that there would be no need for such conference. But with the exit of the United States, and the announcement that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran coming, I highly doubt much good will come of it.

We shall see.

A second Video, a few quotes and I am done.

The video is a second one from UN watch. Tis curious to watch delegates of some of the more oppressive regimes on this planet praise an anti-racism conference.

That’s it for me. Later!

Today’s Nuggets, via wikiquote: Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Bertrand Russell

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. Martin Luther King Jr.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. Herman Hesse

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Two Bullets. Two Places. Two realities. The first two bullets are in a cartoon chimpanzee. Here it is. Now the cartoon is referencing two things, the Chimp mauling in Connecticut, and the Stimulus package, and more directly the man who is the face of the Stimulus package, President Barack Obama.

Oh Good lord tell me this isn’t real. It should not surprise anyone that this racist mess is from the New York Post, one of Rupert Murdoch’s rags. And if you can’t make the connection between race and this cartoon, yer a friggin idiot. Aaaaaaand It gets worse than just the cartoon itself.

There was not only no apology for a clearly racist cartoon, there was a rationalization of it. You might dislike the stimulus enough to say that a chimp could have written it, but it is Impossible to not realize that it would invite racist allusion.

And maybe that was the point. The Post, a shitty newspaper run by idiots to begin with, creates a purposefully racist cartoon to create a stir. Then when someone inevitably reacts to it, they make like there was no wrong done. For what purpose? To get readers. Controversy brings attention, and my thought here, and I am sure I’m not the only one thinking this, attention brings readers. Race as a publicity stunt. Oi….

Like I said, they are Idiots. Don’t ignore the hate. Ignore the paper. BOYCOTT THE POST.

The second two bullets are more serious, and more personal. A man who I worked with for two years, and a young man, just 21 years old, name of Tyrell Jordan, Died yesterday evening with two bullets in his chest after an altercation at a cell phone store. I don’t know enough about the altercation itself to be able to speak to exactly what happened, but i knew this young man. He was a good kid, liked fast cars and trains and basketball and Hip-hop, and a great many other things. He was a friendly, affable, big kid.

Had I not worked with him, both his life and his death would not have left a mark on me. He almost made the news. I read a blurb that mentioned a 21 year old Unidentified young man died with two bullets in his chest, and a friend of his was wounded. Two Bullets. One Death, One man wounded. No names. No nothing. Unidentified corpse.

Bullshit. I knew this man, but they didn’t, so no name. Maybe his parents hadn’t been notified yet. I dunno.

It is unfair, but life is unfair. This young man’s life was stolen from him, regardless of circumstances. All i know was that this senseless killing happened in the Bronx, and that the man who shot him, from what I have heard, is still walking the streets.

But there is a larger issue here, that touches both stories here. Acceptance of violence in society. Shootings and violence of any kind is something that is overlooked and accepted. Think about it, how many people are hurt, wounded, killed every year in the United States? Thousands, and we see every single day news stories about murders, shootings, beatings.

There is too much violence in the world, and I am short one friend because of it. A mother has to bury a son far too young because of it. My Condolences to The Family and friends of Tyrell Jordan. He will be missed.

Two news videos, a few quotes, and I am done.

First one is a story on The Post Cartoon, Via CBSNews.

Second Video has nothing to do with anything I covered today. This is Keith Olbermann talking to MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe and HUD Administration head Shaun Donovan on the housing crisis fix that President Obama put out today.

That’s It for me. Later.

Today’s Nuggets, Via Wikiquote: No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge — it’s deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights. Judith Butler

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Robert A. Heinlein

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Weakness #2: Sen. Ted Stevens was found guilty today on all 7 counts of making false statements on financial disclosure documents. Not surprisingly, Senator Stevens maintains his innocence. Of mild interest here is the fact that one juror had to be excused due to a family emergency, and an alternate had to be brought in, and deliberations had to be started over, and a verdict was reached amazingly swiftly after that. I say amazingly because there were three days of intense deliberations and one instance of one juror being a major asshole at the other jurors, according to all reports that I read. Maybe that’s the juror who left. I dunno, I see nothing that says that is (or isn’t) the case.

Ted Stevens was a lock for the Alaska Senate seat he is defending, but now is locked in a tight race for that seat, with his challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. He has won every senate race he has participated in, getting at least 66% of the vote, but this may well flush any chance of his getting re-elected down the toilet. I would feel sorry for the man, but he made out like a bandit for years. He is allowed to continue sitting until the Senate takes action on his inappropriate behavior.

Weakness #1: Ah, The Joy of Killing…or plotting it anyway. Two young white supremacists, ages 18 and 20, have been arrested in what looks to be some twisted Nazi dream. They had acquired several rifles, cased out one home, and a gun store, to rob it apparently. They were apparently planning to attack a predominantly black school, and then were going to do a drive by and kill Barack Obama, with the assassination being the “culmination of a killing spree”.

Now there are a few things you should know here. Obama had no plans to actually be in Tennessee, where the charges were filed, and where the school attack was to take place, anytime soon. How they were planning on doing it I have no idea. They said they had spoken of Killing Obama, but whether they had gotten past the “We hate N***ers and we should kill some, and their leader too” phase is unknown to me, but any threat to either society in general or one target in particular MUST be taken seriously. They have been charged with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a firearms dealer and making threats against a presidential candidate.

That’s it for the news.

A quick message to everyone out there ready to Crown Barack Obama President. Hold yer horses. It isn’t over yet. Let’s take a quick look at the electoral college and polling for just a second.

According to the real clear politics electoral college/polling map, John McCain has 17 states and 130 electoral college votes, at least according to the Information at hand, locked down, while Barack Obama has 19 states + D.C. locked down, with a total of 255 Electoral votes. But that also leaves 14 states and 153 electoral college votes in either the leaning or the toss up category. Any state that has a lead for any particular candidate of less than 10 percentage points is considered a lean, and anything less than 5% a toss-up. Most of these states have, in past, voted with the Republicans and only two of these states have gone democratic once in the last two elections. Toss-Up states include Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, and Florida. Georgia is called a Lean state, as is Arizona. Put those states in the McCain column, which could conceivably happen, all of a sudden we have a Much tighter race on our hands. It then becomes 255-219.

If you are a McCain supporter, there is no reason to give up hope.

But If you are an Obama supporter, things are very much looking up, but know that the race isn’t over until the last electoral vote is counted. Why, with all I just said, do I say that Things are looking up for Obama? A few reasons. One. Even without leaners, he is, according to the polls, only 16 electoral votes away from victory. Two, even if you give John McCain every single tossup state, and all the leaners that are leaning his way, the states of West Virginia, Arizona, and Georgia, while giving Obama all the states he is leading in, Barack Obama still wins, and pretty handily at that, 306-232.

It;s gonna be fun next Tuesday. Don’t forget to vote, and make sure you bring munchies, this is gonna be entertaining to the last second.

Damn! Politics is more fun than Baseball! No Rain-outs On Election day, Baybee! And no shitty umpires fudging the calls….well…. Anyone who remembers Bush V. Gore might argue that Point. Still better than Baseball though.

A video, some quotes, and I am done.

A Keith Olbermann campaign comment from today. Ashley Todd, John Moody, and a plea to John McCain.

That’s it for me. Later!

Today’s Nuggets: Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. Ron Paul

Walk a single path, becoming neither cocky with victory nor broken with defeat, without forgetting caution when all is quiet or becoming frightened when danger threatens. Jigoro Kano